Martin Ravallion

Martin Ravallion has spent over 30 years working on poverty, with his career as the leading expert on the topic at the World Bank more recently augmented by his more recent position as a professor at Georgetown which has involved teaching an undergraduate class on the topic. From this depth of knowledge comes his new textbook The Economics of Poverty: History, Measurement, and Policy.

Yesterday Martin Ravallion argued that the fact that much of the impact evaluation taking place involves assessing the impact of specific projects one at a time is not that helpful in assessing development impact because it doesn’t tell us about the impact of overall portfolios if there are interactions between policies or if the subset of projects which get evaluated in an overall portfolio are not a representative sample.

When people ask about “development impact” they are often referring to the impact of some set of development policies and projects; let’s call it a “development portfolio.” The portfolio of interest may be various things that are (ostensibly) financed by the domestic resources of developing countries. Or it might be a set of externally-financed projects spanning multiple countries—a portfolio held by a donor country or international organization, such as the World Bank.